The Custard Blog

Words of wisdom from our team of online marketing experts

4 Twitter Tools I Couldn’t Live Without

Twitter is a pretty awesome tool all on its own, but there are literally hundreds of great tools out there that help unleash the platform’s full potential.

However with the sheer volume of information flying back and forth, it can be difficult to manage your involvement in the conversation and to keep abreast of all the latest news in your industry.

So without further ado, here are four killer apps/tools/extensions that make Twitter less of a timewaster and more of a lifesaver.

Buffer

What is it?– Buffer is an update scheduling tool that works with Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. The free version allows you to manage a single account and schedule up to 9 tweets, but for just $10 per month the premium version is excellent value, controlling multiple profiles and scheduling up to 50 updates.

The analytics section provides some great insights into performance, while the scheduling tab allows users to choose what times and days they want to tweet.

All this means that rather than trying to fit in Twitter every day, half an hour here and there to keep your Buffer topped up means that if your hectic schedule takes over, you’re still part of the conversation.

Nice touches – Available as a website, as a Chrome extension and for mobile. The ability to add ‘team members’ to specific accounts is convenient. Myself and Matt B can both log into the Custard Media Buffer without giving him access to my personal tweet queue.

Unlike other scheduling tools I’ve come across, the tweets are displayed in a queue rather than fired off into cyberspace, allowing users to reorder and edit tweets at any time.

Make it better by – auto-filling users’ Twitter handles – currently users have to manually type in the names of anyone they want to @mention.

Crowdbooster

What is it? – Twitter analytics doesn’t get much better than this. Shows number of impressions, replies and retweets for the week, all in one simple graph. Additional tabs allow users to see follower growth over time, influential followers and your top retweeters.

Image: crowdbooster.com

Nice touches – Analyses your historic performance to recommend when you should tweet – great for using in conjunction with Buffer.

Make it better by – improving the tweet scheduling function. This feature is not as sophisticated as Buffer, although this isn’t the major selling point. www.crowdbooster.com

Twylah

What is it? – Twylah allows you to create a ‘brand page’ for your Twitter feed – see mine here and Custard Media’s here.

As partner service Buffer explains, “Instead of monotonous stream, that might only reach back a few hours, they will get a holistic overview about your Twitter presence”. Basically that overview is a webpage containing your tweets, organised by category, with categories ordered according to what you tweet about most. It even pulls in images to make the page visually appealling.

Nice touches – Buffer and Twylah partnered last month and the exposure offered by Twylah’s ‘power tweets’ (reported to be 40 times that of a normal tweet) is magnified further by linking the two apps together and sending your power tweet at the optimum time.

There are also real SEO benefits because while your tweets aren’t indexed in Google, your Twylah page is, including the links placed in your tweets.

Make it better by – having it bring me a cold beer on a hot day maybe?! I really don’t see how this service could be improved.

Pocket

Personally I hate reading blog posts on my tiny iPhone screen and much prefer to have them in a handy queue when I get back to my laptop. Pocket isn’t just a Twitter app (I also use the Chrome extension) but my Twitter reading would be unmanageable without it. Train journeys etc are spent highlighting which of the hundreds of posts in my feed I’d like to read, and as soon as I’m back in the office I open my Pocket queue and let the learning begin.

Nice touches – Pocket pulls the content from your queue together in an easily-digestible format, rather than sending you out to external sites with dozens of links. The ability to search by title or by URL is also a lifesaver when your queue gets a little lengthy.

Make it better by – categorising the pages in my queue to cater for home and work use.

Great roundup, Matt! You know that I’m a huge Buffer fan, but you’ve convinced me to try the others. It seems like Twylah and Pocket are mentioned in almost every Twitter post I read these days – and rightly so! I didn’t realize that Twylah tweets were indexed, so thanks for pointing that out!

hometipster

Some really good info here Matt – I’ve already signed up to a couple. Thanks for the tips.

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